


count to zero, i just want to be

by failsafe



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 02:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassie takes steps toward realizing what will finally end it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	count to zero, i just want to be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Not From Stars (Shadowcat)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowcat/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this, Shadowcat! 
> 
> There are mentions of Nick and Kira's apparent past relationship, and there is some critique of her within the context of canon, but there's no character bashing, just to let you and any/all potential readers know. 
> 
> This story is set in 2013, four years following 2009/the release year of the movie, and all characters are intended to be aged accordingly.

“Fourth most populous city in the world,” Cassie droned as she tucked herself by the long window at the end of the living area of the hotel suite. She turned her body back and forth a bit at the waist, scratching her back between the shoulder blades on the wall as she hugged a long, soft sweater tighter to her slender body. She flit her eyes back and forth over the landscape far down below—bright and glittering and neon-colored. Familiar, though nothing would ever be so bright as Hong Kong.

“And how do you know that?” Nick asked, padding through the suite while he scrubbed a thick, white towel through his hair. He moved almost silently and after a moment he stopped, looking left and right and finally back the way he had come, emerging from the bathroom where he'd dressed for bed after a shower. “How did you know I was there?”

“Watcher,” Cassie replied. “And I have this thing,” she said, picking up the tablet from where she'd set it down on the windowsill and navigating through it with her fingertip away from the app that she used for her drawings a lot these days. Sometimes she still wanted the tactile feel of pens and paper, but the way she could transfer the drawings quickly or back them up drew her to the new medium. “It's called the Internet.”

“Aren't you worried that's going to tip someone off and send them looking for us?”

“That's not the kind of looking they're doing. Fourth most populace city in the world—plenty of interference before they get to me, and no one knows we're here.”

“Whatever you say. Kids and your toys.”

Cassie looked pointedly across the room at the hard, large plastic case that contained Nick's most recent _toy_ of choice. He'd been getting better using firearms with his telekinesis. He kept the weapons locked up, hidden most of the time, but he always had them with him—despite that tactic nearly having gotten him killed in the beginning. She screwed up her face a bit to one side, snarling at the thought.

“Lay off,” Nick ordered, more of a complaint.

Cassie simply rolled her eyes in response but one corner of her lips upturned just a bit. She glanced down at the glittering, flashing lights below one more time before she looked over, evaluating Nick's chest. He often neglected to put a shirt on before he came out of the bathroom when it was just the two of them.

Nick raised his eyebrows and then screwed them up a bit instead.

“Hey. So you've been _watching_ me in the shower?”

“I can't help what I see,” Cassie retorted, tapping her temple lightly. She smiled sweetly, innocently, for a moment not betraying her seventeen hard years.

“Well can you shut your eyes?”

“You know it doesn't work like that.”

“Could you try?”

“Nope. Why should I?” she challenged, nodding to his state present state of dress. She straightened to her full height, chin up as he approached.

“'t's just weird,” Nick said lowly as he came in close enough for her to feel his body heat contrasting with the slight cool that came from the surface of the windowpane. He smiled easily, shaking his head a little as he tucked his towel around his shoulders, draping it over himself as if for some modesty. “Can't get any privacy with you anymore.”

Cassie wondered if Nick knew what his body language looked like—leaning over her, meeting her eyes from an angle just above. She wasn't the skinny kid she'd been four years ago, even by her own admission, but she didn't know if he saw it in his conscious mind. She didn't focus on it, though. It was simply another of the parts of her life she saw in jagged, constantly changing snippets, and since Nick was basically the only person she actually knew, she didn't want to spoil everything. She wondered what it would be like for a Watcher—one as powerful as her mother—if one of the power-boosting serums did work. Would you ever get to live in the moment? Would you ever have a thought that wasn't a flickering glimpse of the future that was likely to lay ahead?

“Do you really think secrets are a great policy here, Nick?” Here. Between them.

“No,” he admitted with more ease than she anticipated, but she wasn't a mind reader. She could see intentions and their effects but not whole thoughts. “I didn't say anything about keeping secrets.”

“Secrets? Privacy? Same difference?”

“No, it's not same difference. Secrets are the things I get to decide to tell you or not. Privacy is what I get to do by myself. You... get it?”

“No,” Cassie replied obstinately, and she saw the look of hurt and confusion manifest itself mostly right between Nick's eyebrows. She waited for him to relax a little, his lips freeing up a bit from the line they'd pressed into to search for a punchline in the pause. “Don't worry. I'm not eavesdropping on you jerking off in the shower. Nothing that remarkable there. Trust me, it's a lot easier than ignoring you bringing some floozie in here you think _might be the key_ to us bringing down Division. _One of_ the Divisions.”

“Hey, that's not nice. Those are your fellow... women. You're not supposed to call them that,” Nick pointed out, a smug grin creeping onto his face as he narrowed his eyes, trying to impart that he was at least a little serious.

“Thanks for noticing I'm a woman, Nick,” Cassie said drolly.

“Wait. If you aren't watching, how do you know I—“

“Everyone does.”

“You do?”

“Everyone.”

“Yeah but not in the shower—“ Nick started, but then he'd talked his way into a corner he didn't want to navigate and he caught his tongue mid-motion.

“Everyone who lives with someone they don't want to see or hear does it in the shower.”

“So you do.”

“Nick,” Cassie snapped, snapping her fingers right in unison with her voice, hand parallel with his temple. “Pay attention.”

He blinked.

“To what? Your fingers?”

“Oh my God, you're hopeless,” Cassie said as she rolled her eyes once again and carried on the same as if Nick had been all the way across the room, glancing down at her fingernails and looking for any little places that were a bit jagged. She still sometimes bit them even though she'd learned to hate the feeling of jagged fingernail dragging across cloth. “We have to talk about why we're _here_ , Nick,” she announced.

“We're here because the last couple of other places we tried didn't check out—“

“Yeah,” Cassie cut him off, “that is a major oversimplification of why we would come to India.”

“Then explain it to me again.”

“Stop rushing me,” Cassie ordered, and finally she sidestepped Nick and stepped away from the window, retreating to the sofa. Most of the suite was dim except for back toward the bathroom Nick had emerged from. Beyond it there was a short hall that led to the two separate but side-by-side bedrooms. When they stayed in larger places, they both preferred having their own rooms, but they rarely slept with more than a wall between them now. They had to be ready to go at a moment's notice, no matter how apparently safe they were, and they weren't going alone.

“Excuse me, princess,” Nick replied as he approached the sofa too and flopped down onto the end of it, rubbing loosely at his forehead with his hand.

Cassie curled on the sofa after she took the actual pad of paper she'd set on the coffee table and she flipped through the black pages with colorful markings on them.

“We came to India because they're the only place I can stand a shot of getting the serum and the follow-up shots without your _lady friend_ getting in the way. Or mine,” she explained as she flipped to the appropriate drawing—a sort of map that she understood that had led them to Mumbai.

“Hey, can we leave Kira out of this?” Nick snapped, lowering his hand from his head and looking pointedly over at Cassie. She met his eyes and demand with a tight, one-shoulder shrug. It was the nearest she'd come to apologizing. It had been four years and they'd _seen_ her alright, but it had never gone their way. As far as Cassie knew, she was back in the States now. Agent _Hollis_ was embedded deep within Division, handling power much the way Carver had but with even more raw force once her injections had taken and she'd stopped oozing out her insides through her nose and eyes. Of course, it was a double-edged sword as far as Cassie knew. There was always the chance for rejection, even after the follow-up injections were no longer a constant necessity. Kira was never going to just walk clean away from Division with no chance of ever needing to go back.

Cassie knew that. She hadn't told Nick. She'd tried but not in so many words.

He didn't want to listen anyway, so it was just easier to let her personal frustration be what she talked about.

“No,” she countered aloud when Nick kept giving her a stern look that didn't even manage to be anger anymore. Deep down, she thought he knew she was right. She allowed herself to scoff a little. “Look, I get it. We don't _want_ to kill her because we don't know—“

“Hey,” Nick warned.

“... We're not going to _get her_ killed if we can help it because we _don't know_ , but we don't know how far this goes. It's like I told you when I found you, Division had their sights on _your_ dad and my mom probably before _either_ of us were born. Before Miss Chickidee was, too.”

“Your point?”

“I know about the photograph,” Cassie said, and she honestly couldn't remember if she was reminding him or telling him for the first time. The crestfallen expression he gave her—a child not wanting his last hope that Santa Claus was real to be crushed—didn't actually tell her much either. She went over these things again and again in her head. She couldn't remember sometimes.

“Don't,” Nick actually said aloud.

“It _makes sense_ , Nick. It makes sense as much as anything else. That doesn't make it true,” Cassie offered and she stared forward at the coffee table and stretched out her long, thin, pale legs to prop her feet up. She let her sympathy settle for a moment before she rolled her head back toward him as she leaned against the sofa, slouching a bit more. “Whatever it is, we don't need somebody who's going to be playing _he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not_ with our _lives_ and whichever version of the past and the future she likes best today. I'm telling you, the girl's crazy and has got a god complex now, whichever way you slice it.”

“That's enough,” Nick said but it wasn't with as much venom as Cassie would have anticipated. She sighed.

“I'm sorry, Nick.”

“Just get back to your point,” Nick ordered impatiently.

A certain cool settled between them. Cassie actually squirmed a little beneath it as she fiddled with the edge of a black page. She didn't like it. It would warm, though, in time. It always did. There was a reason that no matter how many people had come and gone, it had always boiled down to the two of them. She rubbed her lips together, tongue nursing a single chapped little crack she found until she could feel a slight sting. Finally, she cleared her throat.

“I have to do this, Nick.”

“You're going to go and do the _same_ damn thing that makes you not trust Kira,” Nick supplied, giving her one sharp, bitter chuckle as his arms folded over his chest and towel. He still hadn't bothered changing or getting fully dressed.

“Have you got another option?”

“Yeah, we wait,” Nick said, but Cassie almost balled her hands into delicate fists because he was saying that just because he wanted to say it. He knew better.

“ _For_ what?” she demanded.

“A solution that isn't going to cost you your life!” Nick snapped. Cassie paused, staring at him as his frustration flared at her. Maybe she had misjudged him a little bit again.

“It's not my life, Nick. There've been _four years_ of development since then, and Kira... _didn't_ die,” she pointed out calmly, a little apologetically.

“I didn't _say_ it was just going to kill you,” Nick pointed out.

Cassie couldn't help riding out another long pause during which she took several deep breaths.

“What is my life, Nick?” she posited. “What is it? Division's going to kill my mom. They've been holding her all this time like a _lab rat_. If I don't take this chance, I'll have good as given up on her after all this time trying to _change it_. I don't care how many more times I have to _change_ it. I'm not quitting.”

“You're still gonna need those injections, Cassie. Even if we get you in the Division here and back out, all safe and sound, then what?”

“That's where you come in,” Cassie said simply, staring into Nick's eyes with calm expectation, even letting her eyelids relax just a little.

“You want me to get you the injections?”

“Yeah, and if I can't do it, you're gonna give 'em to me,” she replied.

“You think I'd do that?”

“Yeah.”

“You _trust me_ to do that?”

“Yeah. You're the only person I trust,” Cassie confided in Nick, but she didn't dwell on his reaction much. It wasn't the first time she'd confessed that particular thing.

“... Alright. Fine. Let's say... _for the sake of argument_ I'm going through with this: what's the plan?”

* * *

_My name is Cassie Holmes. Division took my mom from me..._

The men and women in white lab coats were indistinguishable, both in their character behind their surgical masks and in their true function—were they doctors, nurses, scientists?

Cassie slept and Cassie stirred.

Cassie breathed and Cassie moved and Cassie stopped.

_Stitches. They can pull your body back together but they can just as easily tear you apart._

Cassie's vitals strengthened on the monitors of the men and women who were scientists or doctors. She breathed and her heart beat. She was for only a matter of moments aware of opening her eyes—then there was a prick in her arm and her eyes immediately rolled back. Then she barely breathed.

_My mother knew a Stitch named Teresa Stowe. She owed my mother a favor. She saved Nick's life for me but she nearly took it again._

Cassie's fingertips twitched and curled down toward her palm as she started to regain consciousness. Her surroundings weren't the same as before. Instead of being in a cold, sterile white room, when she blinked she saw a vivid orange paint up to the ceiling along the wall. The air was still artificially clean and cold. She shivered.

_I can't imagine that kind of pain, my ribs twisting and turning under my skin, bruises rewinding, reintroducing blood into places it had escaped and making it clean again._

_My name is Cassie Holmes, and I gave Nick Gant a flower_. _It took him one year and thirty seven days to tell me that his dad told him that flower would hold the key—that helping that girl, that helping me would help us all._

Cassie tried to move her limbs and she felt the indistinct, post-drug tingle and headache settle it to stay for a while. She tried to groan but her throat was dry and she reached up, feeling. She felt it, the little fine links of a chain. It had worked. The Shift had lasted until the procedure was done.

The procedure—the _injection—_ was done, Cassie realized with sudden and truly alarming clarity.

For a long moment, the stream and flicker of lights in her mind's eye gave her a punctuated and throbbing migraine. She'd never had a real migraine before in her life, but the pain was excruciating nonetheless and it made her try to cover her ears. She kind of wanted to scream, but she wasn't awake enough for that.

 _I've never been Stitched back together, but I can't imagine it feels much worse_.

Then as it faded, she felt the telltale physical difference—something like being sick—but then her eyes were open and she desperately wanted a pen. For the moment, she simply had to settle for making sure she wasn't being choked by the chain around her neck. It was so insignificant, but it would cut down hours or days in Nick finding her.

She had once given Nick a flower and since then it was sort of a thing. They were reverent, superstitious even, about the flowers that came between them. They had been exchanged on very particular occasions or served as signals, but they were anything but insignificant. Then he had given her a flower.

_Moving is one of the better-understood forms of psychic ability. You ask anyone what a Pusher or even a Watcher, like me, is doing, they might give you a much spookier explanation. But Movers? They make sense within the laws of science. Sort of. Even if that's the only law mine ever adhered to._

_Movers can identify the specific atomic frequency of a given object. Once within their range, depending on skill, they can manipulate the gravitational field around that object._

_I have a necklace that stays under lock and key, as securely as any of Nick's guns. The one time he got me a flower—and he didn't make it, trust me—it was made of metal. Attached to a chain at the end of the stem and behind its bloom, it hangs sideways from my neck when I put it on, hanging down low enough for me to hide it beneath my shirt, the clasp hidden behind the flower._

_That metal is nearly indestructible, the color of silver with a dark patina. It's not silver, though. It's a metal that isn't even terribly precious by a jeweler's standards, but sometimes that thing is worth my weight in gold—or more. It doesn't matter because it's mine._

_I can Watch Nick from pretty far away now. I know him—I can't help it. But he doesn't have that kind of ability. He doesn't see, he feels. And he can feel that metal._

“God, Nick, where are you?” Cassie complained, or at least got out the closest approximation to those words as her half-numb tongue could muster. She felt the flower tug up from beneath the hospital gown they had her in and she gripped it, feeling the metal warm to her touch. She kept breathing, deeply, and then her eyes rolled back as she drifted off once more into sleep.

* * *

“You're seriously going through with this?” Nick asked. It had been four days and he still hadn't accepted it.

“Yes,” Cassie said, and she was adjusting, smudging the portion of her otherwise neat, attractive make-up that gave the impression she'd either been crying, blackened a bit around one eye, or both. She glanced above her head at Nick inspected his neatened up haircut, feeling over the lack of stubble on his chin and jaw and around his lips. “And you are too, right?”

“Pretending to be a slime-ball, non-Mover, businessman looking to cash in on a young girl. Got it,” he replied with dry distaste.

“You're my ticket out of there, and you being under the radar of these people is something we're _hoping_ is the case,” she argued.

“I know. I know, I know. Rule number one: get out of there. Rule number two: get out of there with the back-up injections. Got it.”

“Rule number three?”

“Bring your pad and pen.”

“Got it,” Cassie confirmed for him. She followed Nick's gaze as he nodded down toward the sealed, small case where she kept her necklace.

“You taking that?”

“Old thorn in my side?” Cassie asked dryly, though she flashed him a smile and looked around her shoulder to aim it directly up at him. “Help me?” she requested.

“Sure,” Nick agreed. Rather than clasping it for her, Nick lifted up her heavy waves of now dyed-brunette hair while she fed the chain around her slender neck to fasten it herself. Cassie liked color, but now rainbows were too conspicuous, too expected of her. So, for now, her hair was the color of rich chocolate, her eyebrows carefully powdered and penciled into matching. She noticed the slight tingle in her scalp as Nick toyed with it a bit with his fingertips. “When you gonna wash the crap outta your hair?” he asked, smirking at her in the mirror once again.

* * *

“Cassie!” Nick's voice roared out. The sound of shattering glass got Cassie the rest of the way awake and she drew her breath fast like she'd just emerged from beneath deep water. A gunshot fired and Cassie's necklace vibrated.

“Careful, Nick!” Cassie tried again, but her voice was still choked from how dry her throat was.

“We've got to get out of here, now!”

Cassie felt a sting as Nick removed something from her arm and she felt the warm and brief rush of blood but then a soft bit of padding being quickly and tightly taped around her arm. She almost immediately started to feel more alert, but Nick was hoisting her up before she found her feet. Her head lolled against his shoulder for a moment as he moved them along, sending the door flying out ahead of them a ways down the hall. She breathed, inhaling his familiar scent. It was really Nick, and he'd found her.

“Did you get it?” she asked.

“The injections?” Nick asked, and she heard him gulp. Not a good sign. “I'm still working on that, but I had to get to you.”

“Nick.”

“I am—“

“Nick, I need some water.” Cassie took a few deep breaths and worked beneath her tongue to try and draw some extra saliva out to make it easier to speak. “And--” It was getting even harder to speak instead.

She was aware that Nick turned left. Then it was almost dark until some cool blue lights flickered into life. Before she knew it, Nick was setting her down against a crate, helping her lean back against a wall until she slowly pushed forward against her hands to straighten a little. She heard water sloshing and when he held it to her lips, she drank deeply from a flask that might have held hard liquor most days but that, today, just had clean-enough, safe, cool water in it. She gulped greedily.

“How ya feelin'?” Nick asked her as he drew the flask away when she had nearly depleted its supply and water was dribbling down from the corners of her lips a little as she had a bit of trouble keeping up.

Cassie spluttered a bit and languidly wiped her mouth.

“It's... clearer, but it hurts,” she answered, knowing exactly what he was talking about. “You got a pen and pad?”

“That I did manage to keep with me,” Nick replied, and he reached into a pocket and handed her a pen with a bright red ring around the black cap, indicating the color of the nib. Then he handed her a tiny little black pad of paper—almost always black. “You seeing something?”

“Quiet,” Cassie requested softly. Rather than a surly retort, she was met with fingers brushing through her darkened and sweaty hair. She started to scribble and she saw that she was drawing a tiny indication of the storage room they were in. Then she drew a line and she knew that almost always meant a maze—directions. Suddenly her eyes fell on the door. She was starting to feel like herself again so she stubbornly got to her feet no matter how much she wobbled.

“Whoa, Cass—“

“When we get out of here, we have to go back!” she announced a little fiercely, looking right at him.

“What? Are you nuts? Up and out is that way—“ Nick announced, but she could almost hear his preparation to pause before she forced it as she met his eyes.

“I'm seeing something, and I have to get closer. It's _important_ Nick. I... I have to. I get down there. If we go _right now_ I get down there,” she said, and she edged closer to him because she needed his protection and his steadiness right now. She touched his arm. “You got more bullets?”

“I got more bullets.”

“Let's hope you don't have to use them. I've got a headache.”

To be fair, her vision had been pretty much right. They moved along in silence for a while. It _was_ a while, headed back down into the deep complex far beneath the busy, congested streets, before Cassie had to remember how to run.

It was a flurry of motion and she had bloodied, grated floor-imprinted knees by the time they got back to the same orange room they'd come from.

“You had to break the glass,” she commented irritably at the sea of shards, one of which also sliced her foot, but only superficially before she avoided it and Nick swept them away with little more than a twitch of his fingertip. “Further in, further in!” Cassie screeched when the footsteps caught up and she heard another round fire, and this time it wasn't Nick's. She felt the hand press forward against her shoulder blades and she fell through into what looked like a small medical lab for screening samples or something. She whirled around even before she got up from the floor, scrambling backward while she confirmed that Nick had been the one to follow her and that he was unarmed. Satisfied, she started to dizzily feel along the wall to stand back up. “Keep them out!”

“I'm trying,” Nick confirmed with a grunt—but only a slight grunt after all this time—as steel groaned and the air around it turned into a temporary prism.

“This is where I need to be,” Cassie confirmed, and she wasn't sure if it was because she had already seen it or if she'd _seen_ it in her head. It flowed like water, like thought now, though it still seemed fragmented, coming back. She fished the black pad and its pen out of the folds of her hospital gown above her waist and she quickly slammed the pad against the wall to stabilize it for writing. She drew on a new tiny page, and this time a cross appeared, dividing the page into four nearly equal rectangles. She shook her head and turned her page one more time. She did better with multiple colors.

 _I see tiny boxes all along and in a perspective line on the small page, and I know what it is. Through that door._ _All this time we have been looking for a way to change the odds, for a way to tip the war in our favor. And I suddenly **know** it's on the other side. Four years, and serum or no serum, I'm finally good enough to know. _

“Through here!” Cassie ordered Nick and she worked on the secondary door, the bubble of security around them giving way for her to break in. At the very moment the door opened, she turned back to Nick. “Hurry. Run,” she ordered, but she went first because if she didn't he'd wait.

Cassie saw it first. This time it was a comically low-lit purplish room with two very long rows of hospital beds.

“Whoa,” she commented as Nick came in and started focusing on her pad again. More drawing and shaping with her pen, and she heard stirring from some of the beds as some of the beds with patients, but she had to know and _finish_ first. All the patients were young—many of them her age or younger. Most of them were Indian but there were all colors and shapes and sizes. Some of them had something on their skin that made them look less human.

“... Yikes,” Nick complained, reaching up and rubbing the back of his neck before he remembered the door. It didn't give even when he let up so he relaxed a little, keeping an eye on it. He got a little closer to Cassie as she drew against the plastic foot board of one of the still-sleeping children. Cassie was dimly aware of his actions, but she kept drawing—another page and a bubble and a big line and another and she felt like she was drawing an even greater caricature than usual, but it kept coming, almost as if she wasn't even trying. “... Uh, no offense, Cass, but what are we doing down here? I get it. They need... out, but there's two of us. You wanted it that way. The two of us. This is... crazy. What exactly are we gonna do? This many fugitives busting up out of here?”

“No. Not... fugitives,” Cassie replied, frustrated and trying to brush him aside. If any of them spoke English well, they were understanding him. Nick wasn't a good whisperer.

Finally, she was finished with her drawing and began to examine it, trying to realize what exactly _she'd_ meant. It was all so fast and her quickly-growing (actively growing, she realized) power was more than she knew how to deal with.

“Cass, what is going on here?” Nick demanded, and she could tell he was getting a little nervous. “Are we getting out of here or what? We let the right people know they're here and something _might_ happen for them, but we stay in here and—“

“Not fugitives,” Cassie repeated. “That's not how we're going to do this. Some of them will go home but—they think your girlfriend is—“

“Ex,” Nick corrected, and if it had been any other time—if they'd had time—Cassie might have let herself feel alarm. They didn't have time.

“—is patient zero. This is Phase One. Or Five or Seventeen. I don't know.”

“... They're all... post-injection. Not dead?” Nick asked, one eyebrow cocking a bit higher than the other in the dim light. “So what does that mean? They're still in hospital beds. I mean _look at you_. I can't carry them all out of here.”

“I don't _need_ carrying,” a boy a little younger than Cassie spoke up, his accent nearly stereotypically English but with something else. He _sounded_ multilingual. He had been the first to sit up when they'd disturbed their sleep, even with the IV still pumping into his arm. He was strong.

“Right. Uh—Cass?”

_Governments around the world set up what they called Divisions—trying to do what the Nazis couldn't._

_To turn us into weapons._

“We're not going to hide anymore, Nick,” Cassie announced, and then she finally sighed and showed him her drawing. In her chest, she felt something flooding—adrenaline, pride, anxiety, heat and the heat flared up as Nick's jaw slacked and he started to smile.

“You can't be serious—“

Cassie couldn't help rolling her eyes, and it felt like to _momentous_ a realization that _this_ was the future this room, the serum, all of this had led her to. It was kind of incredible, but not just in the impossible-to-believe way. It was real. She distracted herself by walking over to the boy who'd spoken up to get a closer look at him, but before she got so close in that she'd have to introduce herself, she turned back to Nick for a moment longer. He was still holding her pad, still looking down at the drawing—boxes and a cape and a familiar site Nick hadn't seen in years.

“That New York?” Nick asked, playing it off a little.

“Coney Island,” Cassie agreed.

“Cass, be serious.”

“Do you really think I'm joking right now?”

“Fine. Just... Just tell me, okay. I can't handle the suspense.”

“We're not going to hide anymore. We're...” She met the other boy's eyes and her eyelids relaxed a little as she considered it, but she couldn't actually say it without regaining her eye contact with Nick. He was the only person here she _knew,_ even if she knew she was going to come to know some of the others. “We're going to be superheroes.”

And Nick laughed. Guffawed even. Right in the middle of the Division in Mumbai's secret-most parts, Nick Gant laughed because they were going to be _superheroes_ back where he'd come from.

_But that's how we finally started to cause a problem._

_We stopped dying._

_I survived the drug meant to boost our powers. And I'm not the only one._

_Not everyone with psychic powers is fighting with us, but a lot of them are._

_And this is a fight that isn't going to end—not until I have my mom back and not until the experiments stop, for good._

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the song "Superhero" by Tim McMorris. Explained here because kind-of spoilers for the 'punchline' of this if you hadn't heard it before/didn't recognize the title.


End file.
